If you trust social media, here are this year’s Oscar winners

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

If you’ve got money riding in the office pool on who will win the big awards during Sunday’s nights Oscar ceremony, you might want to check this out. A super-socially-aware branding firm has decided to use the power of social media to come up with predictions for winners in virtually every category.

Brandwatch has launched an online portal called “Social Oscars,” which tries to convert tweets and Facebook posts from Oscar-voting critics into a numerical algorithm that can decide which movies, actors, directors, and even makeup artists have gotten the most positive buzz.

Among its predictions are that Daniel Day-Lewis will win the award for best lead actor, Jessica Chastain will take the analogous actress award, and the best picture honors will go to Argo. Among the less obvious predictions are that Les Miserables will win best makeup and hairstyling, and Life of Pi will take the Oscar for best visual effects.

It might seem dubious to some to try to put a statistical value to the way critics have talked about various films and actors within social media, but this is actually a burgeoning science that spans not just award shows, but also politics, brand awareness, and corporate PR.

The difficult part of the equation is figuring out how to determine if a social mention is positive or negative. It isn’t simply enough to gauge how many times “Life of Pi” was mentioned by critics’ Twitter accounts; the formula needs to know whether the message was favorable or not.

In fact, that’s really what Brandwatch is all about — providing analytical analyses of social media for big business. The Oscars prediction engine is just a side project. It is definitely a big proof-of-concept idea, though. Can you take something that is 100% subjective and turn it into something that can be predicted objectively?

For example, Daniel Day-Lewis has been given a 40% score by Brandwatch, while Bradley Cooper comes in a distant second at 22%. If these numbers are anything to go on, it should be a no-brainer for Day-Lewis. For best picture, it’s a little more muddled. Brandwatch pegs Argo’s positivity percentage at 20%, compared to Lincoln at 15% and Zero Dark Thirty at 11%. Only time will tell if this algorithm worked.